Ferrying the Night Owls Who Fix the World's Glitches

NEW DELHI The tiny white cab speeds through the mind-numbing maze of buses, cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, street entertainers and beggars. Once inside a neighborhood, it zips past cows, children playing cricket and women lining up for water.

Monu Sharma, the driver, honks the horn at every moving thing on the road, changing lanes and snaking his way around all the obstacles.

Today, as on most days, Sharma is on a tight deadline, trying to get three employees to a suburban Delhi call center where they work for a company, Quatrro, that provides technical support to computer users in the United States. Their shift begins at 7 p.m. and lasts until dawn. Sharma reaches his first pickup at 4:30 on a humid, windless afternoon.

He has contracted with India's booming call centers for six years, picking up and dropping off employees all day and night in his cab. It is a stressful job, Sharma says, because time is crucial to his clients' business. Still, he is grateful he isn't working as a personal driver at a client's residence.

"I don't have to be servile, saying, 'Yes, sir' and 'Yes, madam' all day and carry my boss's briefcase everywhere," he says. "In this job, I just focus on the time and the road."

The first employee to be picked up is Tapasya Arya, a young woman wearing a crisp, white cotton shirt and jeans. She carries her office purse and a red gym bag.

"I go to work when everybody is returning home," Arya, 24, says, climbing into the back seat. As the cab speeds off to make its next pickup, she can see the rush-hour madness, and hear the blaring horns.

"Call center employees sleep so little; we work all night and get home at dawn," Arya says. She is relieved that there is air conditioning in the cab today. "I am hardly able to catch up on my sleep in the day because the doorbell rings constantly. It is easier to sleep in the AC cab, in spite of the bumpy and noisy traffic."

Owais Khalil Khan, the second employee to be picked up, says he has learned to manage on five hours of sleep at a time. "Sometimes our driver falls asleep on the wheel driving us back at dawn," Khan says. "I turn on the radio loud, so the music wakes him up."

It takes Sharma more than an hour to collect all three employees from labyrinthine neighborhoods, but he and his passengers are finally on their way to Gurgaon, a New Delhi suburb that is choked with glitzy, glass-fronted call centers and malls.

Arya's cellphone rings. Her mother is calling.

"Yes, Mumma, I am in the car. . . . Yes, the car came at the right time. I had soup and fruit, Mumma," she says.